http://www.newyorker.com/
SCALIA RESIGNS POST AS SCOUTMASTER
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who for the past forty-seven years has served as a weekend scoutmaster for the Boy Scouts of America, angrily resigned from that position yesterday, effective immediately.
Justice Scalia quit his post in a terse resignation letter that read, in part:
“Some of the happiest memories of my adult life have been as a scoutmaster. Huddling under blankets around the campfire, and so forth. But now, all of that has been ruined. Ruined.”
Shortly after sending the letter, Justice Scalia destroyed his scoutmaster uniform in the blazing fireplace of his Supreme Court office.
Later, he went across the hall to share his decision with his close confidant on the Court, Justice Clarence Thomas, telling him, “There’s nowhere I feel safe anymore, Clarence. The military? The N.B.A.? Nowhere. I guess the only place I still feel safe is the Supreme Court. This is still a safe place, isn’t it?”
Justice Thomas said nothing in reply.
Photograph by Alex Wong/Getty.
Cowardice Prevails!
Boy Scouts Cave To Political Correctness!
In response to the Boy Scouts of America’s extremely disappointing decision to allow “openly gay scouts,” Father Richard Perozich of the Diocese of San Diego wrote the following:
From a Catholic spiritual understanding, homosexual attraction is a strong tendency toward a moral evil. In no case can it be approved. Even a young Scout with this condition can be helped. If, however, he declares this condition as his identity with the right to act on it, the other Scouts need to be protected from him and the influence of his ideation, any homosexual sexual touching or talk, or invitation to participate in or to accept this evil.
I would not allow a child under my care to be near either another child or an adult who identifies with, encourages acceptance of, or practices homosexuality. Our parish gave material support to the Scouts in our region until yesterday. We have withdrawn financial aid but will support them with prayer so that the adults retreat from their cowardice before the evil of homosexuality and its perpetrators, and be about protecting and forming young men according to classic Scout values in accord with Catholic teaching.
Pray that more of our bishops and priests have the moral courage to address this most unfortunate situation, and provide moral guidance to their flocks.
From Lesbian Atheist to Stay-at-Home Mother of Six: Quebec Journalist Tells Her Story
By Georges Buscemi
May 20, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) - “I was an atheist for as long as I could remember,” recalled Brigitte Bedard, a young-looking 41-year-old journalist and stay at home mother of six with cropped tousled brown hair and stylish thick-framed glasses. She was addressing a crowd of 200 participants at the Quebec Life Coalition pro-life conference on May 15 in Quebec City.
While Bedard is less well known than the conference’s keynote speaker – Cardinal Marc Ouellet – whose staunchly pro-life statements made later that afternoonwere seized on by the anti-life Quebec media, she might be the speaker who most touched hearts that Saturday afternoon.
Bedard had a typical childhood in a non-religious household, and went to the notoriously leftist Université du Québec à Montréal, where she studied literature, eventually graduating with an MA. “I filled my mind with all the radical feminist literature — I drank it all up,” she said.
She began a series of heterosexual relationships, which all ended badly. “Prodded along by what I was reading, I began thinking that since all my heterosexual relationships were failures, that I might be a lesbian.” And in fact she dove into the lesbian lifestyle, and admitted that she revelled in it for quite some time. “It was actually a very good time, in a way, being with a big gang of girls, tearing up the town, chain-smoking like there was no tomorrow. I was also very sexually active.”
Despite the fun and the excitement of the lifestyle, she felt broken, she recalls. “I was a mental wreck. I just felt that I was spinning out of control, that I was keeping appearances but I was miserable inside.” Things came to a head when, inexplicably, she broke into tears one night at 3 a.m. and began shouting in her empty apartment in a trendy district of Montreal, imploring God to “take her away.”“Here I was, a militant feminist lesbian atheist lying on my apartment floor crying my head off imploring God. I wasn’t in my right mind, but I was desperate for help.”
She began seeking help, meandering in and out of countless 12-step type programs, in the hopes of finding some kind of solution for her anxiety and “messed-up life.” To make matters worse, she had just quit smoking: “I was suddenly forced to face life in the raw, without any protection or buffer.”
At wit’s end, she recounted how someone she knew talked about visiting “the monks” at the famous Saint-Benoît Abbey in Saint-Benoît-du-Lac, Quebec. The idea, as bizarre as it seemed to her, intrigued her, and she went, but not without reservations. “I went to the monastery armed with all the contempt and hatred for the patriarchal Church that I had stored up from years of radical feminist studies. For radical feminists the Church is basically enemy #1.”
She entered the convent and was assigned a room and a monk with whom she could converse twice a day. “For three days in a row, two hours a day, I badgered, screamed at, practically foamed at the mouth in the face of this monk, dredging up basically every insult, cliché, dirty thing that I could think of, or invent about Christianity. I was so mad, so hurt and angry, and I was dishing it all out to this monk, who never said a word the whole time, but instead just looked at me, nodding his head.”
Then, at the end of those three days, something happened that changed her life forever. “It was the third day, the sixth hour of screaming. We were about to wrap up yet again. I was basically done screaming, there was a pause, and then the monk looked up and said to me: 'you have no idea, absolutely no idea how much God loves you; He made you out of nothing, he knows you, you have no idea how much he loves you, His daughter. So don’t feel ashamed, let it all go. Give it up, give it all up, give your life up to Him … He loves you so much.'”
Those simple words at that crucial time “absolutely floored her,” she recalled. From that moment on, her life had utterly changed. “I am His daughter, there are no two ways about it, and I can’t explain it.” She admits she is at pains to explain exactly what it was that caused her conversion: “I just say that God floored me, staggered me; I didn’t convert myself, he brought me to Him.”
She now works as an independent journalist and happily-married stay-at-home mother of six. Life for her now is not all peaches and cream, however. “When I need quiet, there’s nothing I can do except for one thing: get up at 4 a.m. Which I do, pretty often, just to get some peace.” Remarking on the differences between her life now and in her lesbian days, she quipped: “Living with a man is definitely a pain, but living with a woman all the time was a living hell.”
Brigitte Bedard, who writes for the Nouvel Informateur Catholique, was one of four conference participants (plus keynote speaker Cardinal Marc Ouellet) at the annual Quebec Life Coalition conference at Quebec City on May 15. Video recordings of the talks (in original French, or dubbed in English) are available through Quebec Life Coalition.
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